Skeptics who don’t believe people will use Apple’s iPad to read books may have to rethink their position today, after Amazon showed off a pretty impressive Kindle app for the iPad and other tablet computers. Kindle for tablets is both a reading app and a bookstore, allowing you to instantly purchase books as well providing a fancy-shmancy touch-screen interface for reading them.
Like Kindle for the iPhone, this version will sync purchases and where you are in a book across different devices. Unique to the tablet edition, however, are both a page-turning animation and full-color photographs, something obviously not available on the grayscale screen of the Kindle itself.
You have to wonder though whether Amazon isn’t taking a bit of a risk simply by making an app with such obvious appeal. With such a compelling application, full of multimedia possibilities, who but the most conservative of techie book lovers is going to want to read on a black-and-white eInk screen when they can not only get full colour on an tablet, but all the other things it does too: web surfing, games, email, apps etc. It seems quite plausible that Kindle for tablets that will make Kindle 2 itself a much less appealing proposition.
[via: Wired]